Saturday, February 22, 2014

Texas-based filmmaker J. Fabian describes the rocky road to making his second feature, including the travails of adding name talent to his project, in the person of Jason Mewes:

I had the idea of doing a spoof of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi trilogy for a few years because my best friend, Elvin Bibiloni, who had already starred in the first feature I had produced, bears a pretty decent resemblance to Antonio Banderas. Their accents are very similar, and they even have the same birthday.

But I resisted the urge to try to shoot another ultra-low budget feature, because it's such an overwhelming task. In order to do it, you have to make it your obsession, thinking about nothing else but getting your film made.

I had been working at a gentleman's club with a floorman named Tracy. I had been cordial to him but had never really gone out my way to talk to him, when one day we were talking about a feature I had produced called movinG.

He had heard about it through a mutual friend and had not only watched it, he spotted a copy of it at Blockbuster. He thought it was kind of cool that someone from Dallas had produced a movie that was in the famous video store. Now, at the time I had never realized my feature was in Blockbuster—my distributor had never told me that we were in there—but that is another story.

But just the fact he had seen my movie and spoke well of it, I have to admit it appealed to my ego a little bit. So, I was definitely warming up to him, and then he mentioned he had a working studio and had shot a few shorts.

All of a sudden wheels started turning in my head. Maybe I could get this guy to partner with me on my next feature. So, after getting him a few shots at the bar, I told him about the idea I had for a spoof of El Mariachi and that whole trilogy and introduced him to Elvin, and he loved the idea.

I told him I thought we could shoot it for ten grand, since I didn't have to buy or rent the equipment, plus paying the actors by deferment. He looked me straight in the eye and solemnly assured me, “yeah, for sure we could.”

Judging from what it eventually cost us, I guess neither Tracy nor I could count very well. I started working on the script, and I couldn't believe how fast it came, and Tracy had a lot of funny ideas that he contributed to the project.

I was so excited when he told me he could get his Dog Pack production company to help out. Wow! We were going to have a whole crew to help shoot his thing. But quite prophetically he said that in the end it would probably be just him pointing the camera, and me holding the boom mike, which eventually is what happened when we were finishing up shooting the small stuff.

Tracy and I agreed Elvin's character, who goes by "El" (as in "The") is a buffoon, but he is also a badass. And though we were making a comedy spoof, our goal was to have more and better action than El Mariachi. Not that we thought we thought we were better filmmakers than Robert Rodriguez, we thought this was possible because our lead had years of training as a martial artist, and Tracy and most of his Dog Pack brothers were martial artists, as well. Plus, we had technology that Robert didn't have at the time he shot El Mariachi.

As Tracy was working on the fight choreography, and I was finishing up the script, I thought, "man, wouldn't it be funny if the villain Nacho was Jason Mewes playing himself, and Nacho was the name he used in Mexico to run his criminal empire?" Tracy loved the idea, so that's how I finished the last part of the script, with Jason as Nacho.

About a week later I saw Tracy at work, and reality came crashing down on my little fantasy. "We can't get Jason Mewes to do our shitty little movie," I realized. "He makes real movies in Hollywood with Kevin Smith!"

So, now we begin casting for our big feature, with no ending because we have no established star to play Nacho. We pressed forward looking for shooting locations, and since the gentleman's club we worked at was really nice and was huge, it would be a great place to make the headquarters of Nacho's criminal empire.

I asked the General Manager if he thought the owner would let us film there, and he assured us no problem, which was perfect because this building really was a monster.

Things were coming along well on the script. I had added a few scenes spoofing Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, since Tarantino and Rodriguez collaborate on a lot of stuff, and because they are two of my favorite directors. I thought of it as a tribute. I also made one of the leads never speak till the very end, as sort of a tribute to Kevin Smith.

We had some success in finding actors by placing an ad, but they weren't what I wanted. So, I contacted Katrina Cook of Katzcasting and hired her to help us get first-class actors who worked for deferment, which really means free, unless your crappy little indie movie makes money, which almost never happens.

When we told her how we really wanted Jason Mewes for our movie, she said that she had worked with Jason before and would contact him and send him the script. His agent said Jason liked the script but was doing a project right now but might be available later. Which I thought meant "No, Jason will never do your crappy little movie." So the search was on for our villain.

During a preproduction meeting, we happened to mention how we needed a star for our feature, when an actor we had cast who told us his business partner knew Carlos Gallardo, THE guy who starred in El Mariachi, and he likes to work in small movies to help small filmmakers. I was like "wow, if we could get Carlos to play Nacho, that's perfect for our twist ending, and it kind of ties us in to the whole El Mariachi trilogy."

We had a meeting with our crew, and I told them the news that we couldn't get Mewes but we had a great shot of getting Carlos, who had asked for a copy of our script and liked it, and this would really be better than having Mewes in our movie, even though I was really crushed about not getting Mewes, and honestly how many people knew who Carlos Gallardo is? But, at the same time I was pumped about the idea—how freaking cool would it be to have EL MARIACHI in our movie!

A few days after the meeting, we get an email from Carlos's agent saying Carlos asked to see my and Tracy's filmmaking resumes, which were pretty slim. After seeing what we had actually done, he let us know that he wouldn't be available, but great script though.

So, now I'm trying to come up with any second-rate or washed up celebrities, Vanilla Ice, Ron Jeremy, Big Black, Kato Kaelin, Mel Gibson, seriously I told Katrina to make Mel an offer. What could it hurt, maybe we could get Mel?

As all this is going on, I'm buying costumes, props, air guns... the costs are already at 5 grand, and we haven't even started shooting.

I'm starting to feel that maybe I bit off more than I could chew, trying to make a big action film for ten thousand dollars, when out of the blue we get a call from Mewes’s agent.

Jason is available on this given date, but it's going to cost us more than we offered, plus we have to fly him out first class, and that's going to expensive as hell because we have to do it within a week.

Now, if I decide to agree to the terms, I've more than doubled my budget. Hmm, I don't have 20 thousand cash, but I do have credit cards. And I accept the offer.

We start shooting in one week. It's nut cutting time but I'm damn excited, so I inform our GM that we need the club on this day when it's closed, and I'm told to quit bugging him about this movie, and think about my job. This puts me in a pickle because I signed a pay-or-play agreement, and Mewes gets paid whether we shoot on the agreed days or not. So I cut Mewes a check for the agreed. Tracy and I quit our jobs and start looking for a place to shoot our epic climatic action scene where El faces Nacho.

We have less than two days till Mewes flies into Dallas, and I went to someone I had known for a while and thought we were pretty good friends, Jason Kabolati, owner of Agora Entertainment, one of the biggest movie studios in Dallas and basically offered him oral sex if we could shoot at his studio. After a long uncomfortable silence, Kabolati replied, “Fabian I'm flattered, and maybe even a little curious, but I don’t swing that way, buddy.”

OK, that’s not the way it went down, but I did basically go to him hat in hand like a mortal climbing Olympus and begged for him to help us anyway he could. I told him the deal I had with Mewes and that I desperately needed a place to film our scene at his studio for one day. Jace asked how many days we needed and very generously offered us Saturday and Sunday at no charge, and he let us shoot a couple of more Sundays to finish anything we needed, at no charge as well. My man Jace! Coming through in the clutch.

That whole week I was a bundle of nerves. We actually got to speak with Mewes on the phone. That was pretty cool, Tracy and I were excited like schoolgirls on our first date. Mewes was really going to be in our movie!

Finally, the day came to pick up Mewes at the airport. It was really cool meeting someone whose work I had enjoyed for a long time.

He was pretty tired from podcasting the night before with Kevin Smith. I dropped him off at the hotel and told him what time he would be picked up.

The next day was the big shoot. We probably had sixty or seventy people on the set with all the extras and crew, with 3 cameras running. It looked like we were making a real movie.

Jason was totally professional. All the leads thought he was really cool, everything went great.

I wish the rest of the shoot had gone that way. After the first week, our lead who had taken a week off from his real job so we could shoot hard 6 days in a row, went back to work and then took a second job, because he was having financial problems, so I was only getting him on Sundays.

Then our female lead moved to Lubbock and would come back to Dallas once a week, so the days I had them together shooting didn't happen very often, so it dragged the shooting schedule out.

Then one of my leads gets arrested, and I have to spend $1500 bailing him out of jail.

I have no job, and I'm hemorrhaging money at this point. When I get a letter from the hotel where I had put up Mewes, for extra charges because Mewes upgraded to a suite, ran up a big room-service bill and was charged a hefty penalty for smoking, which is not allowed in the hotel.

I called him up, and we discussed the situation. He said he had no problem paying for the upgrade to the suite and the room-service bill, but he didn't think he should have to pay for the smoking fine because no one informed him that he couldn’t smoke. We went back and forth, and he never did pay me back for the fine.

In hindsight, I wish I had not said anything, because I had called him a few times, and I wanted to use him for a horror movie, and he seemed pretty interested in it, and he was a cool guy to talk to. But after this, I was going through one of his assistants to get my money back. I'm sure he thought I was being a dick, but I was just a struggling filmmaker who was rapidly going through all of his money.

We finally get the thing shot and in the can when, about a week later, another arrest threatens the project: the guy we had hired to edit our movie!

My world is collapsing at this point. I can't get ahold of him for a week. I don't know if the cops have taken the computer that the whole movie is on. I'm losing my mind, until we finally we get word that the computer is at his house, and luckily the cops didn't take it as evidence.

We finally get the thing done for about 28 thousand and had our screening at the Texas Theater. The response from the audience was fantastic. It made me feel good, but now we need to get distribution. So that’s the next phase. Living the dream, baby. Living the dream!

Rod will be posting here soon about three other features he's made, including his latest release, My America, which The Boston Globe called "a shocking drama on the subject of racism"

Though tmaym.com doesn't, as a rule, do interviews, this is an edited transcription of a conversation with Rod, who has difficulty typing at the moment, since his hand was broken in a car-meets-bike accident (he was on the bike)

New England-based filmmaker Rod Webber describes how one indie feature led to another... and the personal manifesto that has guided his more-recent work:

After doing a couple of short-feature documentaries, I started writing Monkfish around 2001.

I had always wanted to make a film, a written one, not just a documentary. I'd spent most of my 20s working on music, feeling I wouldn't yet have anything valuable to say as a filmmaker. Finally, I felt ready to make a switchover.

I wanted to make a funny movie. I was a fan of slapstick 80s comedies, and at the same time a big fan of Jim Jarmusch films and things of the weird, like Fellini's 8 ½. And I always liked movies about bungling robbers. I envisioned Monkfish as a mishmash of those... with Danny DeVito in it.

I wanted to make a heist movie. If the nemesis was a DeVito-type person, that made for an odd physical conflict.

I started passing the script around for a director to attach to it, and that director ended up being Dave Lewis. He's a Boston guy, he liked the script, and he was able to put up the financing.

The more we did script revisions, the story changes made me uncomfortable. Ultimately, I said "Listen, man, I'd be happy to write you a new script."

There was a short scene in Monkfish, a 5-minute gag that Dave wanted to expand to become the focus of the movie. It had virtually nothing to do with my script. He went off and wrote a feature-length film called Mob Yoga, the first act of which became his conceptual short film, Spaghetti and Matzo Balls.

I didn't see myself being the director of Monkfish, but that cartoon lightbulb appears over your head—it's that moment when you say "If I want to put this out in the world, I have to direct it." It was really just a matter of "No, it's not me. I have to take responsibility for it, I have to be the director." If you care about the art, you've got to do it yourself.

For the role I'd written with Danny DeVito in mind, we cast Doug "Tiny the Terrible" Tunstall. Tiny is an out-there character, with dozens of different stage names. He's a professional wildman, a court jester. Despite the fact he's 4'7", he's built like Hulk Hogan. He's a force of nature who needs to be seen to be believed, which is where two of my subsequent documentaries come in.

By some people's definition, they might say Tiny is mentally unstable. I spent a good year of my life getting him out of a mental hospital. He started running for mayor of Pawtucket, RI, derailing Monkfish for a time.

Eventually, we finished Monkfish, though I don't consider the cut we've (privately) screened to be the final version. I have a new version sitting on a shelf, which I hope to get out there.

Production of Monkfish was on and off, people in and out of the production, different hair between 2004 and 2006, and new stuff shot in 2007. I had to leave the final edit aside, when I made a decision to focus on A Man Among Giants, a documentary about Tiny's 2006 run for mayor. It was an easy choice, no worrying about continuity errors in a doc.

Dave Lewis plays a major on-screen role in the documentary, because he bankrolled Tiny's campaign.

I shot my next film, I Thought You Finally Completely Lost It (otherwise known as Diversion), in 2007. It's an improvisational film, shot in 3 days.

I came up with a manifesto (see below) to avoid all the things that had happened in Monkfish. After the many years of working with Monkfish, dealing with mentally unstable people, I developed a very quick shooting technique. I'd be driving to Rhode Island from Boston, and then Tiny would have to get boozed up, or smoke a ton of pot, or go chase after hookers, and I couldn't do anything about it. When all was said and done, I'd have maybe an hour to shoot before I had to get him back so he could go see his kids. And this is no way to shoot a movie.

I thought about what if we honed these quick-shooting techniques and applied them to a film without all the crazy people involved, and shoot a feature in three days.

I called up my ex-girlfriend, Irina Peligrad, and said "I have a concept for a movie, this is what it is, are you down?" And she said yes.

By 2009, I'd saved up a good amount of money to do a full promotional campaign for a couple of my completed films. But I got a call from Tiny on April Fools Day—which at first I thought was a joke, but hearing the echo, I realized he was in jail. I went and bailed him out.

A couple of days later, Tiny was supposed to be at the Boston premiere of A Man Among Giants. The Rhode Island state police broke down his door and brought him to a prison mental hospital. Apparently, he'd been shooting his mouth off in court.

I spent the next several months trying to get him out, and I made a documentary about that, American Psych Ward.

There's a place in Rhode Island where they throw their political unwanteds and other troublemakers, called Eleanor Slater Hospital, which was run by a psychologist named Brandon Krupp. He was one of the good guys, but he realized it was a corrupt institution. He stepped down as the head (shortly before Tiny was locked up), making a big public statement, saying it was basically a modern-day gulag, where they would throw people away to let them rot. This did, indeed, seem to be an accurate statement. Google it—you can find plenty of details.

Tiny had made himself such a political nuisance, they were sick of dealing him, and they locked him away.

I will grant them that Tiny is a bit of a crazy guy, but I'm not saying that in a scientific, clinical sort of way. He's not going to harm himself, he's just a nutty court jester. He's banging on the mayor's office every two minutes. He's on disability, and he has nothing better to do with his time.

He ended up getting 17% of the vote, he's such a charismatic individual. The actual mayor was afraid he might succeed, and thus the political gulag, which is ridiculous.

I pretty much exhausted the marketing budget I'd built for the previous films on lawyer fees and making American Psych Ward itself. But I did save enough money to help get as much press as possible, and to use that as a tool to get him out.

I rented out the Somerville Theatre for five days straight, and there was so much demand we decided to do a sixth day.

There was coverage in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, newenglandfilm.com, in hopes to spread the news to Rhode Island.

On the day of the fourth screening, they let him out. No explanation, just "goodbye."

Rod Webber's filmmaking manifesto:

1. EXPERIMENTATION:Spend a day filming people interacting with each other and observing their actions. Create a concept based upon something someone says or does.

2. TIME LIMIT:Principle shooting to take place in three days

3. COST:Spend no more than $3000

4. ACTORS:Actors must be unaware of story. The director must guide the actors through their journey by playing one of the roles.

5. CREW:No communication between cast and crew except on breaks. Conversation limited must not be related to the story at hand.

8. STYLETo avoid jump-cuts, camera-person must be in motion or turn at least 15 degrees every minute

9. CO-EXISTENCE OF CAST AND CREWWhen entering a new location, “actors” must naturalistically turn on light/ turn off any pre-recorded music or media.

10. AFTERWARDSOnce principal photography is completed, pick-up shots are permitted, but may not exceed the time it took for principal photography. No time limit on post-production.

Wildcard rule:Once per day, any crew member may instruct any actor to do ONE thing.

Instruction will be by text message. When you receive the text message, try not to make a big deal of it. DO NOT reply to the crew member, under any circumstances. Just carry out the instruction to the best of your ability.

The wild card rule is intended to steer the course of the story places we were not expecting.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Fernando Gil of Boring Monkey Productions candidly describes making a no-budget movie without any expectation that it would be especially good:

Despite my rotten memory I remember the day I decided to actually write the script I've been itching to make a movie out of. Not the exact date, but during late December, while I was skipping out of the final exam of an English class I was going to fail anyway. I enjoyed going to that class mind you, but I was a few papers behind and I was going to eat that F anyway. Grew tired of the community college grind and decided while sitting on a park bench that cold winter morning that I was going to do something. Just do it. And I did, it was that impulsive decision that lead to two years of slowly piecing together a flick that would be called That Thing. Directing wasn't something I dreamed of when I was a kid, only in the year or two before that December morning did I start getting the urge to tell a story in that way. Should be easy, right? In retrospect it was probably a stupid idea, but hey, it got done.

I knew I would have no budget straight from the start, I've always been poor and I've never been one to ask for money. It felt ridiculous to have a budget or to even credit somebody as a producer, because anything that was paid for came out of my nearly empty pocket. Having no money probably freed us from trying to make a “good” movie. Didn't have to worry about being commercially viable, wasn't even planning to sell it. Was free to make a movie as I saw fit, good or bad. And I think that was the best way to go about it.

Wrote the script in a way that took advantage of the location I just happened to be born and raised in, out in the streets of the South Bronx, definitely added some character. Nearly all the scenes are during the day so we wouldn't need to spend as much time lighting and that worked out well. Made it so that nearly all the characters and their actors would only require one day's worth of shooting. Both a blessing and a curse because I didn't have to worry about people I wasn't paying flaking out, but it also meant I had to fill near two dozen roles, which resulted in using more non-acting friends than I would have liked. Even worse was scheduling all these people around their real jobs and lives, trying to get five or seven people to show up at the same place at the same time was never easy. Frustrating work outside of the actual movie making part. The reason the film took so long to make was because we only got to shoot a scene once every couple of weeks if we were lucky.

The experience felt like a hobby, a very frustrating hobby. I mean, once everyone was finally on set and we started rolling, it was bliss. Maybe that's the hind-sight talking but I hardly felt stressed when shooting, those were the fun times. Still kinda boggles my mind that I was able to gather that many folks together just to make something. Borrowed nearly everything outside of a tripod and the hard drive I cut the thing on, most of the budget went to lunch and the occasional prop or two. And about two years after that cold December morning there we were again, fighting the snow and shooting the last scene. And that was the easy part.

What came next was the editing of so many video tapes and coming to the realization that the movie I just made was not good, it didn't look good, didn't sound good. And that was something I had to accept, this was no Hollywood flick. From the beginning I knew I was not making a Hollywood movie, it's just a thing that was made in my spare time with the spare change that was in my pocket. Nonetheless, that realization hits hard, especially when you're on the fourth month of editing at nights while running on nothing but a can of leftover Dr Pepper because you're too broke to pay for food. When you hand someone a burned DVD with those two years of your life on it, it's hard not to tell them to look past the lack of a budget, you feel the movie can't speak for itself. Whether that's true or I'm being hard on myself, I'm not sure. Probably a little of both.

A hard lesson to learn, but probably the best way to learn it. By putting the feet to the fire, actually creating something and seeing it through from conception to completion, that experience offered wisdom that I couldn't gain from merely taking a class or reading some books, many lessons that would have been glossed over without the context. Those lessons, those words of advice I hear from other directors and such ring much more clearly now. I've been there and back.

“What now?” is the question I've been asking myself lately. The cost to make it was less than most folks who walk into a Best Buy spend on their 50-inch television set, and I'm proud that we actually made a movie for that much. No regrets. But sometimes it feels like a tree fell in the forest and nobody was around to hear it, I hope it doesn't just rot in the hard drive. It'll find it's way to the internet sooner or later, but will people watch? Probably not. If nothing else, at least I proved to myself that it could be done, as long as you have that burning desire to tell a story and you're stubborn enough to see it through to the end you can make a movie, education and upbringing be damned. That Thing is a small glimpse into the way my eyes saw the world. Now I just gotta take those lessons and make another. Made one already, the next one should be easy, right?

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Nathan Cole, writer and co-producer of Reno, NV-based drama, The Waterhole, describes how his team used that rarity, a larger-than-expected budget.

His post is titled "The Film Budget Buffet":

The journey to getting our film The Waterhole made was a lengthy one, filled with false starts, long periods of waiting, and stress. Through it all there was only one certainty: there was always money to be spent. The cost to make a film is at the forefront of every producer’s mind, whether you’re a studio putting together a summer blockbuster or an indie filmmaker crowdfunding a micro-budget film. Reaffirming this is the fact that pretty much every filmmaker I have spoken to, aspiring or not, wants to know what our budget was. I know many independent filmmakers might disagree, but the budget affects most of the creative decisions we make. Money will not make a bad movie better, but it can make a good movie better.

The Waterhole was always conceived as a low budget film. How low of budget was never really known. At one time I thought it could be done for as low as ten grand, so when my co-producer, Daniel Menahem, came up with a sum far greater than that we thought we would have more than enough to make the film we envisioned with money left over. The reality we discovered is that if given the chance, there is no ceiling as to how much you can spend on a movie. Also, if you spend in one place, you will spend in another. A rising tide indeed floats all boats in a film budget… for the most part.

The one area where we were willing to spend money that we knew would directly affect the quality of the final product was on cast. The script is dialogue-heavy and character-driven. If the actors aren’t believable, the film is dead. We hired a casting director, Mark Tillman, a position we initially thought was a luxury (how hard is it to find actors in LA?), but it became evident early on that he would earn every penny we paid him. Mark was able to get us access to thousands of young actors in Los Angeles, carefully weeding out the ones that would not work and keeping those that had the talent to handle the script. Mark knew we weren’t interested in “names” but also kept in mind those actors that might be on the verge of breaking big. We had tons of casting sessions, which is a great way to get a feel of how different actors tackled the characters and to hear the dialogue read aloud. Mark also handled all the contracts and dealt with the managers and agents. All of which was incredibly helpful and time saving. Of course, the most important thing he accomplished was to get us our great cast.

Another position we hired that at first we were reluctant to spend money on was a line producer. If before we started you asked us what a line producer did, I would have not been able to tell you. Now I have no idea what we would have done without him. We met Michael Tarzian after he responded for a job posting. We had one conversation with him and realized how much we were in over our heads. Mike knew every last little detail of how to budget for and run a production. He was able to get a full crew, organize a reliable schedule and keep the whole operation running while not letting the spending get out of control.

This was not without a lot of back and forth from us as we tried to cut out line items from the budget that Mike fought to have put back in. For instance, anything we could do ourselves we did not want to pay for, such as location scouting and catering. It was a major pain, but we did those things ourselves. We did not think we needed a third AD, so we axed that position and were fine without it. One position we resisted at first was that of an art director. We thought that by shooting on location we would not need to dress sets or deal with props and what we did need we could manage ourselves. Mike persisted and we relented and allowed him to hire one single person to handle it all. Within one day the new art director had proved his worth by doing a great job transforming our locations into something unique. It was an eye opening experience.

The only problem was that by hiring only one person in the art department Daniel and I ended up in over our heads trying to keep up with the amount of work and constant attention needed to every seemingly insignificant detail. Making it worse is when we were needed elsewhere we struggled to move crew around to fill in for us. This was a lot of extra stress that could have inexpensively been avoided. At the end of the day having a good line producer let us experience making a film with, for the most part, a full crew. It could be argued that we could have achieved the same results without them. This might be true, but in terms of what we learned, having them was invaluable.

As we wrapped and headed into post-production, the decisions as to where we should spend money became harder to make. We shot so fast and dirty that the rough cut was a bit of a nightmare to watch. It didn’t take long to realize we needed to spend a lot more than we had left in the budget. The audio had issues and the cinematography, although fantastic, was too dark to be viewed in all but the most perfectly calibrated monitors. Despite our post house’s best efforts to deliver us a polished product it just wasn’t working. We needed more money to do a better color correction, clean up the audio, and do some ADR with the actors. In addition, we had to license several songs that were needed to enhance the tone of the movie. We had hired a great composer, whose cues really do a great job heightening the emotion of key scenes, but there was much more that we needed to prevent a film that takes place in a bar from getting too quiet. In the end we had to make sacrifices and were unable to bring the actors back into ADR and if I were to be nitpicky, the sound in some scenes is one of the areas we failed to completely make the production work.

The money you have to spend will almost always affect the choices you make and sometimes it will make them for you. On a low budget film you stretch that money as far as it can go, sometimes making artistic sacrifices, sometimes asking your crew to make sacrifices. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses and adjust as needed. You need to take care of the crew that are working for low rates and asked to do more than they normally would be required to do. Most of all you need to stay true to your vision. This is a very difficult balancing act. When people ask for advice I am usually at a loss. There is so much to tell, yet so little that may be of any use to any one filmmaker. Every experience will be different, and there is no right way to make a movie.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Here, DC-based filmmaker Sam Moussavi shares his personal recollections of creating the film, his first feature. He titles his post "So you want to make an independent film?"

There were times during the twenty-two day shoot when I would ask myself: "What are you doing? What the hell kind of a life is this?" Directing a goat to walk up and down the sidewalk in downtown Washington, DC will bring about these reflective questions. But such is the life of an indie filmmaker.

Amateur Hour is the first feature length of Austere Films, Justin D'Agostino's (Producer) and my production company. We wrote the screenplay in February 2010 and somehow raised the budget by June, which set the table to actually shoot the thing in September.

It was shot on the Red One, with a single-camera setup and a total crew of about ten on a good day and five on a bad one. Ninety percent of the cast and cast were local from the Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia area. The film was shot in those same three states, with the majority of the "outdoor hangout" scenes being filmed at a National State Park in Virginia called Sky Meadows State Park. We wanted to take advantage of the idyllic scenery that the state park had to offer us, as a major portion of the film takes place at the crew's "outdoor hangout," in front the white shed, by the old picnic table with a cooler full of root beers.

The music in the film was a two-headed monster: during the "Dream Girl" sequences in front of the glowing jukebox, Thievery Corporation (Washington DC power DJ-duo) provided the soundtrack. While the rest of the film was scored by local DC composer and Jazz pianist named Thomas Nassif. On insanely short notice, Tom was able to put together a string quartet of music students from American University, and they in turn put together the soulful score of Amateur Hour. Along with live trumpet tracks that local musician Joe Brotherton provided, Tom put together an amazing musical ensemble that complemented the visual aspects of the film wonderfully. Working with Tom on the music, not just the style but philosophy behind the music, was one the most rewarding experiences for me during the entire process. The collaboration between director and composer is extremely important when talking about the tone and pacing of a film and Tom's work and dedication enhanced the film without a doubt.

Amateur Hour is (loosely) based on Justin's and my struggles raising money to make a film. Filmmakers worldwide are constantly dreaming up crazy ideas and schemes to fund their films. That is what we wanted to tap into with Amateur Hour. It conjures up memories of the classic heist genre, where a crew is formed of different misfits, who encounter both internal and external hurdles, while chasing a goal. It was also my intention to create a comedic film that does not have to rely on the vulgarity or shock value that most films contain today. The style of the film is cinéma vérité, very much in the tradition of the classic French films of the 60's.

When the concept on Amateur Hour was first conceived, it was our goal to create a piece of juxtaposition. Not only with the characters and their incongruous interactions, but also with the aesthetics of the piece. Here we have this comedic film with HEART, accompanied by a jazz score, that is shot South American-style, along with a running dream sequence and flash-forward sequence to boot. I don't like to pigeonhole the film into a certain genre; so that is why I call it a comedic film with heart. The heart lies in the true message of the film. The main character believes that it is not simply about "creating something," but that the thing you are creating must affect the world in a positive way. I hope that this message shines through to the audience, but you can never be sure.

As the director of a film, something interesting yet jarring happens when you bring a cast and crew together to shoot your film... you have to give up pieces of your film and share it with the other members of the crew. That was very difficult for me at first, because from the very beginning of the project, from writing to casting, I had complete control. It is quite the humbling experience. And I had to swallow some pride. Once I understood this dynamic, it made the shooting days much more pleasant. You also realize that every crew member's job is equally important, whether it is the sound guy, the runner who picks up the food for day or the person in charge of picking up the goat (his name is "Billy," and we borrowed him from a local wildlife sanctuary) for the final scene of the film. Now that the project is over and I've I taken a step back from it, I have a true appreciation for everybody who was involved in the project to bring it to life.

Making a feature is definitely a beast, and it is something that you cannot tip-toe into; you have to dive in head first and see where you end up. There are a tremendous number of emotions flowing through your mind and body and it doesn't help to dwell on any one of those emotions. The most important thing is to get everything you need for the day so that you can have something to cut that does justice to the screenplay in the end. Coincidentally, there is also this indescribable energy that percolates throughout the entire crew during principal photography. There is a family dynamic that invariably occurs with the cast and crew members spending twelve, sometimes fifteen hours a day with each other. Eating with each other, laughing with each other, arguing (as was the case a lot of the time for us) with each other. And yet in the end, it is all about reaching a singular goal: not killing one another along the way. That's what makes filmmaking equal parts invigorating and vexing; it's totally unpredictable. But when shooting is done, the family dissolves, and it is just you and the footage. You have to sift through all of the rubble that will eventually become your film. There's no magic. And there's no guarantee that you are going to get a chance to do it again. You go with what is in your mind and in your heart. And you live with the results.

I will start with my “What if...” as all good movies should start. “What if it is 40 years past the zombie apocalypse and humans and zombies have now learned to coexist?” This is the idea I had for my film almost 7 years ago--a Zombie Romantic Comedy (or Zom Rom Com for short) where we see a love story in a world where zombies are an every day part of life. I am also a fan of a film that has something to say, so I added issues of same-sex marriage, migrant workers and references to abortion and euthanasia. All of these pieces helped to create a solid story and characters the audience can fall in love with.

I began my journey as a filmmaker making a series of short films on related subjects. Many of these films were part of competitions. Although fun, these films were primarily giving me a chance to try things out and find the styles that worked for me. I got to try long-shots, musicals and even a movie shot in one continuous take. I got to work with an array of talented actors from all over New England. Finally I decided in 2009 that I was ready to do it--I was ready to take on my first feature film, and in my mind, a Zom Rom Com was just the place to start.

Writing began in the summer of 2009, and we had it finished by October. As I am a child who came from no money, we began fundraising in November of 2009, hoping to reach our goal and begin filming by April. But a bad economy and a natural disaster fund really made it harder to fundraise.

By May of 2010, thanks to many very generous donors, we had raised enough to begin shooting my first feature film. I put together an awesome collection of talented crew and hard working actors. We began shooting in June, took a break in July and resumed in August, filming all of the way until November 12th 2010. Along the way, we also shot promotional material and teasers for the film to help the film succeed.

It was not an easy process, and I will admit that attempting to produce and direct at the same time was almost more difficult than I could handle. This was a tough shooting schedule because of the locations and attempting to get all of the actors in the right place at the right time while working around their busy schedules. Makeup was tough and we had trouble with crew due to the economy--finding free available help became almost impossible. Despite all of the hurdles, there were some great times too. We had a blast filming, got to meet some great people and pulled off some amazing scenes. Not only that, but we shot a really cool music video that will be shown during the credits of the film.

Now almost two years from the start of the process, Cost of the Living: A Zom Rom Com is being edited and will hopefully be complete and screened August of this year. The film has really come together and is a work I am very proud of. I feel this is a great way for me to begin directing feature films, a dream of mine since I was a child.

Please feel free to visit the website for the film: www.lovethyjob.com/zomromcom and please donate to help us with post production and festival submission costs. On the site you can see the cast, crew and trailer for the film. Hope to see you at the premiere!